All the difference in the world are as nothing compared to this: the d — Michael Marshall Smith

"Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is."

"My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that youre coming after it."

"Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much-feted opposables, spending their days busy carrying things and controlling machinery and touching interesting parts of peoples bodies. They dont get to do any of that. Instead they just get pushed into small, dark leather places and forgotten about, and when theyre let free they often seem little more than a strange fringe on the ends of your feet."

"It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didnt watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of presented subject matter, made the view itself seem more real. If you watch something in particular, all you see is that thing happening. You see the moment, the event, and you are distracted from the long, slow tide of eventlessness underlying it. If you watch nothing, then you see everything. You see the thing as it is."

"As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places, and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with email address private driveways, it sdotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands likea gods. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. Its about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down — our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work."

"One of the big things about being a man, shed noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasnt enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business."

"There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. Its been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got."

"My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women."

"We agree with the District Court that the surgical center requirement, like the admitting privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an “undue burden” on their constitutional right to do so."

"If the proverbial man of the planet Mars would come to this earth and inquire about the difference between "leader" and "ruler" he would learn that "rulers" are strange people who dressed in ermine, wore crowns, married foreign women, kept strictly to themselves, and had the inclination to administer the country without asking the people about their wishes. A "leader," on the other hand, he would be told, is a regular fellow in a simple uniform who embodies his nation, who tries desperately to create by propaganda complete unison between his ideas and the people. A leader, he might hear, was a local boy who made good, who spoke everybodys language, who never traveled abroad and disliked titles and royal paraphernalia."

"I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women."

"Washington is a city where dwell many of the first men of the land, and the women they married when they were young."